Hillary Clinton hosting a small business forum at Bike Tech, a shop in Cedar Falls, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Unlike Bernie Sanders, who has said little in this campaign about small business, Hillary Clinton often declares that she wants to be "the small-business president." And her campaign has dedicated itself to the notion that her team has thought through the issues — all the issues — so completely that in order to find its most detailed meditation on how she would help small businesses one has to click through two documents and then scroll half-way down a third, a 5,200-word blueprint on "Revitalizing the Economy in Communities Left Behind". Other nuggets are scattered across countless separate factsheets.

Offering training, mentoring, and incubators to 50,000 entrepreneurs. This is hardly novel. Through the Small Business Administration, the government already funds an entrepreneurial development network of small business development centers, women's business centers, and organizations like Score. In 2015, the government granted $137 million to these programs (and another $80 million to others), which, according to the S.B.A., counseled 345,000 clients and trained 600,000.

Expanding and making permanent the New Markets Tax Credit, a program to stimulate investment in low-income areas. In 2014, the Treasury Department allocated $3.5 billion in tax credits, which investors will take over seven years. Clinton would double the current credits, and add new credits for declining industrial areas.

Doubling the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which supplies money to small lenders, mostly nonprofits, that in turn fund businesses and other needs in low-income neighborhoods. In 2015, the CDFI Fund awarded $182 million to organizations that in the previous year made a total of $3.4 billion in loans and investments. Only about a quarter of this went to small businesses, however, in financings that averaged less than $70,000.

Doubling financing for the State Small Business Credit Initiative, a temporary program created in 2010 to provide $1.5 billion to state-run business financing programs. It is set to expire in 2017.

Which leads me to the other theme: unlike a traditional Democrat, she doesn't demonstrate much faith in the traditional vehicle for delivering aid to small businesses, the S.B.A. It's not clear if her mentoring and incubator initiatives would rely on the existing S.B.A. network, and her financing initiatives would bulk up Treasury Department and state programs, not similar S.B.A. offerings.

I would love to know why Clinton appears to be avoiding the S.B.A., and many other details about her small-business agenda. And if her campaign ever responds to my requests for more information, I'll share what I learn with you.

The rest of her specific small-business agenda seems to be narrowly concentrated on easing regulations of one sort or another. She proposes easing oversight of community banks, which tend to dedicate more of their portfolio to small business loans. She calls for cutting "red tape for small businesses at every level of government" — no details on what exactly that means — and unspecified simplified tax filing and "targeted tax relief." The tax relief appears to include eliminating capital gains tax on small business stock held for more than five years.

That should come as welcome news to the sort of conservatives who like to claim a monopoly on small-business sympathy. But of course, all politics is political, and so instead the Republican-allied National Federation of Independent Business called attention to her modest — by comparison to her rival Sanders — plans to raise taxes on the wealthy. It is true that, like Sanders, Clinton proposes an array of other policies that small-business owners would be sure to notice. They are, for the most part, similar to what Sanders has outlined. The difference is one of degree — and that reliance on modest government incentives and other programs:

Clinton would invest $275 billion in infrastructure over five years, paid for by unspecified "business tax reform" (see the "sticks" that follow immediately for some examples). On an annual basis, it's a little over half of what Sanders proposes.

Clinton would deploy both carrots and sticks to encourage companies to create U.S. jobs. Carrots include an R&D tax credit tailored to small businesses and startups that can't use the existing credit and a "Manufacturing Renaissance Tax Credit" to lure new manufacturers to communities that others have left, as well as eliminating capital gains taxes for long-term investments in troubled industrial areas. She would double the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a $130 million program to help smaller manufacturers adopt technology, and expand the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, a more recent endeavor linking businesses, government, and academia "to nurture manufacturing innovation and accelerate commercialization." She would establish a $1,500 tax credit for every apprentice a company hires.

As for sticks: she calls for limiting corporate opportunities sheltering profits overseas by tightening tax rules. According to the Tax Policy Center, which has compiled and analyzed Clinton's various tax proposals, she would restrict so-called inversions (mergers where a large U.S. company buys a smaller foreign one to take advantage of the smaller firm's tax status), make it harder to characterize domestic profits as deductible interest paid to a foreign parent, and tax companies leaving the U.S. on their overseas profits. While she hasn't repudiated existing trade deals like Sanders and Republican Donald Trump have, she promises aggressive enforcement for violations.

She promises more sticks — but also a shiny new carrot — to improve working conditions. The sticks will sound familiar, especially if you've read the Sanders write-up. They include making it easier for employees to organize unions with the Employee Free Choice Act. She backs 12 weeks of paid family leave (funded by raising taxes on the wealthy — keep reading), paid sick leave, and fair scheduling, and will protect workers from other forms of exploitation. She would raise the federal minimum wage to $12 (Sanders would raise it to $15) and close the wage gap between men and women with the Paycheck Fairness Act

The carrot? Clinton proposes a two-year tax credit for companies that share profits widely with their employees, especially lower-paid workers. The credit would equal 15 percent of the shared profits, and more for small business.

She will raise taxes on the very rich. While Sanders proposes to raise taxes on everyone making over $250,000 (separate from his near-universal 2.2 percent "Medicare For All" premium), Clinton is concentrating her fire at millionaires. People making over $1 million would be subject to a minimum 30 percent income tax (the "Buffet rule") and she would levy a 4 percent surcharge on adjusted gross income over $5 million. She also proposes treating carried interest as ordinary income. And for people in the top tax bracket (individuals making over $413,000 or couples making around $465,000), Clinton would revamp the capital gains tax with a remarkably complex arrangement. Assets held for less than two years would be taxed as ordinary income, and rates would gradually fall for assets held longer — those held for at least six years would pay the maximum rate under current law of 23.8 percent.

Finally, Clinton proposes changes to the estate tax that largely mirror Sanders's. Both would reduce the threshold for tax to $3.5 million for individuals, but Clinton's tax brackets are more forgiving, and top out at 45 percent.